> The answer is no. I disagree on your reasoning though. > > It would certainly be harder to write in assembler. It would be possible to match or > exceed MAME's current accuracy with a version written in assembler. However in this > very unlikely situation it wouldn't be assembler that helped
Right. My point was that assembler would hurt simply because it's an order of magnitude more time-intensive to write and debug.
> You probably wouldn't have time to work or sleep as Intel & AMD are likely to have > released hardware that dwarfs your optimisations before you finish.
That's less likely now than it was when we started MAME (only nutters like myself commonly run machines over 4 GHz) but we're slowly learning to take advantage of multicore. The real issue is these modern CPUs are so smart about reworking your code "live" for optimization that hand-tuning is mostly irrelevant.